Apple gets respect in China, Amazon steals a Windows Phone guy and then picks a fight with Dropbox. http://live.twit.tv/

GUEST: John Falcone, CNETLOWER THIRD URL: www.cnet.com, @falconejp

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Today's date

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This is 'Tech News Today' for Friday June 21 2013

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China got Apple to bow. The People's Republic has been hammering Apple over its warranty policies. Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized for miscommunication and promised a new repair policy for iPhone 4S and 4 as well new explanation pages. The State-run Global Times wrote that Apple's "apology letter has eased the situation and was "worth respect."

Although Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, he had finalized designs of future iphones to include the next two versions, according to San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. Gascón says he learned this from Michael Foulkes, Apple's head of government liaison. The pair met to discuss ways of reducing the rate of theft in the city, such as by introducing "kill-switch" technology to forthcoming devices. Gascón described Apple's response as "very underwhelming", and Foulkes told him the next two iPhone designs "preceded Tim Cook", to mean they'd been designed years earlier.

Prepare yourself for a double dose of Google privacy news. First up, Google is looking at potential fines from all over the EU. The French data protection authority, CNIL, says Google hasn't responded to its requests to revise its new privacy policy launched last year. CNIL is giving the case to EU member states to deal with the issue meaning Google could face fines in a number of countries. Next up, Google's director of privacy, Alma Whitten, is stepping down. She's been on the job since 2010 and will stay with Google to help with the transition to the new director, Lawrence You.

Have you beret-wearing Europeans ever wondered why all us crazy cowboy Americans whine about AT&T. You may get the chance to find out firsthand. The Financial Times reports Verizon and AT&T are teaming up on a bid to buy the world's second-largest carrier, Vodafone. Under the deal, Verizon would buy out Vodafone's 45% stake in Verizon's US operation, and AT&T would snap up the rest. Meaning AT&T would become second only to China Mobile in the world.

Remember Anso Labs, the cloud computing startup that originated at NASA, and was acquired by Rackspace a little over two years ago? Some members of the team have a new project called Nebula, which builds a turnkey computer that will turn an ordinary rack of servers into a cloud-ready system, running OpenStack. Plug the servers into what's called the Nebula One, then you “turn it on. and it boots up cloud.” runs an operating system called Cosmos that grabs all the memory and storage and CPU capacity from every server in the rack and makes them part of the cloud. Two big customers: Genentech and Xerox’s research lab, PARC are already on board.

HBO must feel very complimented today. The season premiere of Game of Thrones not only broke ratings records, but also BitTorrent records. Within a few hours of the premiere, OpenBitTorrent tracker showed 163,088 people sharing a single torrent of the show. That breaks the record of 144,663 set by the season premiere of Heroes. TorrentFReak estimates the show was downloaded more than a million times within the first day after airing.

Amazon's updated its Cloud Drive desktop app for Windows and Mac with a Dropbox-style file synchronization feature that will make it easier to manage files across multiple computers, and they're calling it File Sync! You can access your documents, photos, music, and other files in the Amazon Cloud from a dedicated folder on your computer, Files dropped in this folder are stored in Cloud Drive and can be accessed from a computer or the Web. Install the Cloud Drive app on a second computer, & all of your synched files will be synched.

Network World reports the IEEE has launched a study group to explore development of a 400Gbps Ethernet standard. IEEE says networks can expect 58% compound annual growth rates in bandwidth on average,and would need to support 1 terabit per second capacity in 2015 and 10 terabit per second by 2020. 100Gbps Ethernet is just now coming to market after the standard was ratified in 2010. Work on 100G began in 2006. IEEE may need to move faster to faster ethernet this time around.

I'm sure every reporter had to check the following story a bunch of times before saying it was safe - on April 1st, Amazon hired Charlie Kindel. Kindel is a former general manager of Windows Phone at Microsoft and wrote a whole bunch of stuff on his LinkedIn profile. He listed his position at Amazon as director of "something secret." Amazon phone, anyone?

- almost-daily media criticism for 2 weeks from People's Daily & Foreign Ministry, facing threats of penalties from China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce as well as its quality and inspection bureau, Apple apologized to Chinese consumers on Monday for poor communication over its warranty policy and said it will change the terms for some of its iPhones sold in China.- Greater China is Apple's second-biggest and fastest-growing market, with sales up almost 40% to $6.8B in the final quarter of 2012.- "[apple's] reaction is worth respect compared with other American companies," wrote popular tabloid the Global Times, published by the People's Daily.- first targeted in mid-March by state broadcaster CCTV during its annual consumer day segment. Volkswagen AG also criticized, plans to recall vehicles to fix a gearbox problem.

- Charlie Kindel, former MS Windows Phone GM, just joined Amazon- He wrote the following on his LinkedIn profile: "I’m building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I’m hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers."- His latest job is described as "Director, Something secret"- “Amazon presented an opportunity to build something new that has ginormous potential. I simply couldn’t pass the opportunity up."- Kindel's previous experience: at MS GM of Windows Phone app platform and developer experience- Also worked on Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center

Report from eMarketer says 40% of mobile ads are clicked by accident- Nuance wants to make voice recognition in ads- Nuance advertisement vice president Mike McSherry:“Siri created an industry. People play with it. It’s witty. Why not give these same sorts of tools to ad agencies?” - Examples are fun "magic 8 Ball" interactions- You know which people are actively, not accidentally engaged with ads- Nuance already inked deals with ad firms Digitas, OMD, and Leo BurnettQ: Fun, useful or annoying?

- Fast Company noticed that Apple posted 12 different positions related to Siri over the weekend- Positions include Siri web developer, operations engineers, software engineers and interaction designer- Fast Company thinks this means that Siri's going to expand noting the Siri Integration Engineer who will "triage and prioritize incoming feature enhancements and functionality regressions that may arise, ensuring that the tickets are appropriately categorized."- Apple bought Siri back in 2010 and made it a flagship feature in the iPhone 4S in 2011

Q: What could Apple do with Siri to make it more than just a gimmick?

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Happy Birthday Osborne 1, portable computing for real - On April 3rd, 1981 Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It had a 4 MHz Zilog Z80 CPU, two single-sided floppy drives, 64K of RAM, and a five-inch monochrome CRT display. What made the Osborne 1 extraordinary was the fact that the 24-pound plastic machine had a carrying handle on the back -- and at the bargain price of $1,795 with software included.

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HTC One Pre-Sales Start At AT&T April 4 For $199.99, Smartphone Ships April 19

- Android-based Smartisan OS created by Luo Yonghao, ex-English teacher, founder of blogging platform Bullog.cn (now Bullogger.com) chairman of Chinese font studio Redesign, consumer advocate.- announced a year ago that Smartisan would shame other manufacturers. missed december deadline, team of 24- showed off OS in 3-hour presentation of four parts: Visuals, Functions, Humanization and "two more things" - visuals: says other Chinese manufacturers have "unhealthy" obsession with iOS' square icon style and grid layout. has redoe icons that look official yet futuristic, hairy paw for Baidu Search, triangle for Google Play (smartisan wants own app store eventually)- no wallpaper option ,No icon labels by default but can be turned on in settings. zoom out to an overview of four home screens with 36 icons (or even up to nine home screens with 81 icons on full-HD devices), where you easily drag one icon from one screen to another- huge feature list: phone automatically unlocks if its proximity sensor detects it's out of the pocket, reminder to rotate phone when capturing video in portrait position, SMS delivery delayed by three seconds in case of regret

- first public beta for select devices (including the Galaxy S II as shown in the demos) will be available on June 15th, followed by Smartisan's very own hardware at some point next year -- by which point Luo will stop supporting third-party devices.